(Semi-)Automated digital preservation archives for small institutions and private users

Large heritage institutions have been addressing the demands posed by digital preservation needs for some time. In contrast small institutions and private users are less prepared to handle these challenges. An increasing quantity of digital collections is held by small institution with limited know-how and awareness of digital preservation. Digital assets are becoming more important for an increasing number of institutions in the long run (e.g. legal obligation, intellectual property or business data). The limited resource in these institutions for archiving drives the need for new approaches of (fully or semi)-automated archiving systems. Research and development in the area of digital preservation is mainly done by memory institutions and large businesses. Consequently, the available tools, services and models are developed to meet the demands of professional environments. Automated archiving systems are needed for institutions with little professional know how in digital preservation. Important aspects are hiding the complexity of the processes, providing support for decision making and automated error handling. The automation of preservation workflows raises a number of research questions, e.g. metadata management, quality assurance and tolerable limit of loss of preservation actions and automated preservation planning

Analysis of College Students’ Personal Health Information Activities: Online Survey

Background: With abundant personal health information at hand, individuals are faced with a critical challenge in evaluating the informational value of health care records to keep useful information and discard that which is determined useless. Young, healthy college students who were previously dependents of adult parents or caregivers are less likely to be concerned with disease management. Personal health information management (PHIM) is a special case of personal information management (PIM) that is associated with multiple interactions among varying stakeholders and systems. However, there has been limited evidence to understand informational or behavioral underpinning of the college students’ PHIM activities, which can influence their health in general throughout their lifetime. Objective: This study aimed to investigate demographic and academic profiles of college students with relevance to PHIM activities. Next, we sought to construct major PHIM-related activity components and perceptions among college students. Finally, we sought to discover major factors predicting core PHIM activities among college students we sampled. Methods: A Web survey was administered to collect responses about PHIM behaviors and perceptions among college students from the University of Kentucky from January through March 2017. A total of 1408 college students were included in the analysis. PHIM perceptions, demographics, and academic variations were used as independent variables to predict diverse PHIM activities using a principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical regression analyses (SPSS v.24, IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA). Results: Majority of the participants were female (956/1408, 67.90%), and the age distribution of this population included an adequate representation of college students of all ages. The most preferred health information resources were family (612/1408, 43.47%), health care professionals (366/1408, 26.00%), friends (27/1408, 1.91%), and the internet (157/1408, 11.15%). Organizational or curatorial activities such as Arranging, Labeling, Categorizing, and Discarding were rated low (average=3.21, average=3.02, average=2.52, and average=2.42, respectively). The PCA results suggested 3 components from perception factors labeled as follows: Assistance (alpha=.85), Awareness (alpha=.716), and Difficulty (alpha=.558). Overall, the Demographics and Academics variables were not significant in predicting dependent variables such as Labeling, Categorizing, Health Education Materials, and Discarding, whereas they were significant for other outcome variables such as Sharing, Collecting, Knowing, Insurance Information, Using, and Owning. Conclusions: College years are a significant time for students to learn decision-making skills for maintaining information, a key aspect of health records, as well as for educators to provide appropriate educational and decision aids in the environment of learning as independent adults. Our study will contribute to better understand knowledge about specific skills and perceptions for college students’ practice of effective PHIM throughout their lives

Living Legacies: Recovering Data from 5¼” Floppy Disk Storage Media for the Commodore 64

In an attempt to investigate the challenges of recovering and preserving digital objects from legacy systems this case study focuses on working with a particular storage medium and computing hardware. This study illustrates the physical and representational challenges that result from recovering data created with a Commodore 64 computer and stored on 5¼" floppy disks. A system for classifying types of digital objects found in the sample of recovered data was developed. This study contributes to the discourse of collecting institutions engaged in digital preservation and provides examples of ad hoc solutions for working through the challenges of recovering meaningful information from legacy systems. The issues that come to light in this study can be extended beyond the context of the Commodore 64 to include other types of digital resources and computing artifacts that will potentially cross the archival threshold in the near future

Personal Digital Archiving

Personal Digital Archiving ist ein wenig untersuchtes Forschungsgebiet, dass sich mit der Archivierung privater Daten durch private Anwender beschäftigt. Individuelle Archivierungsstrategien, eingeschränkte technische und organisatorische Kompetenzen und emotionale Entscheidungen verhindern automatisierte Archivierungshandlungen, wie sie für die institutionelle Langzeitarchivierung definiert sind. Diese Arbeit untersucht, welche Konzepte der institutionellen Langzeitarchivierung in skalierter Form auch durch private Anwender adaptiert werden können und wie diese in Deutschland durch Bibliotheken in ihrer Funktion als Experten für die institutionelle Langzeitarchivierung, aber auch als direkte Schnittstelle zum archivierenden Nutzer vermittelt werden können. Vorgeschlagen wird die Erstellung allgemeiner Informationen unter Beteiligung von nestor sowie die Vermittlung innerhalb von Veranstaltungen zur Informationskompetenz an wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken und die praktische Umsetzung durch den Aufbau gemeinschaftlicher Repositorien an öffentlichen Bibliotheken.Personal digital archiving is an underresearched area of digital preservation that deals with the preservation of personal digital objects through individuals. Varying archiving practices, limited technical and organizational competencies as well as affective actions prevent the establishment of formal archiving standards. The thesis explores how digital preservation practices can be scaled down to benefit individuals‘ archiving needs and the role of German libraries as operating instances in digital preservation and information literacy. The distribution of basic archiving information for the general public through the nationwide nestor preservation cooperative is recommended as well as teaching personal digital archiving as a part of information literacy in higher education and the establishment of community archives through public libraries

Aggregating Private and Public Web Archives Using the Mementity Framework

Web archives preserve the live Web for posterity, but the content on the Web one cares about may not be preserved. The ability to access this content in the future requires the assurance that those sites will continue to exist on the Web until the content is requested and that the content will remain accessible. It is ultimately the responsibility of the individual to preserve this content, but attempting to replay personally preserved pages segregates archived pages by individuals and organizations of personal, private, and public Web content. This is misrepresentative of the Web as it was. While the Memento Framework may be used for inter-archive aggregation, no dynamics exist for the special consideration needed for the contents of these personal and private captures. In this work we introduce a framework for aggregating private and public Web archives. We introduce three mementities that serve the roles of the aforementioned aggregation, access control to personal Web archives, and negotiation of Web archives in dimensions beyond time, inclusive of the dimension of privacy. These three mementities serve as the foundation of the Mementity Framework. We investigate the difficulties and dynamics of preserving, replaying, aggregating, propagating, and collaborating with live Web captures of personal and private content. We offer a systematic solution to these outstanding issues through the application of the framework. We ensure the framework\u27s applicability beyond the use cases we describe as well as the extensibility of reusing the mementities for currently unforeseen access patterns. We evaluate the framework by justifying the mementity design decisions, formulaically abstracting the anticipated temporal and spatial costs, and providing reference implementations, usage, and examples for the framework

Repositório digital pessoal semântico baseado na “cloud”

Doutoramento em InformáticaAo longo do tempo os indivíduos procuraram sempre formas de preservar o conhecimento, recordações e experiencias de vida. A busca por suportes estáveis que possam preservar as recordações dos efeitos da passagem do tempo leva à projeção das mesmas sobre objetos físicos. Estes objetos eventualmente são agregados em coleções que representam partes das vidas dos seus criadores, e que que podem ser partilhadas com outras pessoas. O uso generalizado das tecnologias da informação, conjuntamente com a sua simplicidade trouxe consigo uma mudança de paradigma, levando a que muitas interações que poderiam criar objetos físicos sobre os quais seriam projetadas recordações passassem do mundo físico para o mundo digital passando a criar objetos digitais, sobre os quais também podem ser projetadas recordações, tal como o que acontece com os seus equivalentes físicos. Devido a sua natureza digital estes objetos são simples de criar, manipular, duplicar e partilhar. Estas características colocam-nos numa posição em que podem ser gerados facilmente, usado para transmitir conteúdo aparentemente trivial que é depois partilhado e prontamente esquecido. No entanto, apesar destes objetos poderem passar a incorporar memorias, a combinação do excesso de confiança nas suas características intrínsecas e de uma atitude que convida ao esquecimento acabam por impedir este desfecho, o que pode levar a que no futuro os indivíduos percam o acesso a estes objetos. O trabalho desenvolvido ao longo desta tese foca-se sobre este problema, propondo resolve-lo com a criação de um sistema de repositórios digitais pessoas para a recolha de informação sobre o conteúdo pessoal de cada individuo. Em vez de se focar na recolha do conteúdo propriamente dita, um repositório digital pessoal dá prioridade à recolha de metadados sobre o conteúdo (desde que este não esteja em perigo iminente) de forma a no futuro poder guiar os indivíduos de volta aos serviços na “nuvem” onde o conteúdo ainda reside no seu contexto original. Em cenários pessoais não é viável recorrer a pessoal especializado para proceder a recolha e seleção destes dados. Para mitigar este problema, os dados são recolhidos o mais cedo e próximo da origem quanto possível por agentes de recolha. Estes foram desenhados de forma a minimizar a intrusão nas rotinas dos seus utilizadores, ao mesmo tempo que oferecem serviços complementares que podem ser utilizados de forma independente do repositório digital pessoal, fomentando assim a adoção do uso destes agentes. Este trabalho também descreve uma proposta de extensão ao modelo CIDOC/CRM, utilizado para classificar e organizar a informação recolhida. Esta extensão foi criada devido à necessidade de dotar o modelo de novas entidades e propriedades destinadas a lidar com objetos digitais e cenários pessoais.Throughout time individuals have always sought forms to preserve their knowledge, memories and life experiences. Physical objects provide a medium upon which individuals are able to project their memories, in an attempt that they remain in a stable support better able to cope with the passage of time. Physical objects eventually coalesce into a collection that comes to represent part of its owners’ lives and that can eventually be passed on to others. Widespread use of information technologies, coupled with their perceived ease of use has shifted many interactions that would end up producing external memory objects from the physical to the digital realm. As with their physical counterparts, digital objects can also be used by individuals to project their memories. Due to their digital nature, these objects are simple to create, produce, manipulate, duplicate and share. These traits place them into a position where they can be generated without too much effort to convey what might appear to be trivial content, readily shared and forgotten afterwards. Though, through memory projection they could become part of their creator’s legacy, overconfidence in their reproducibility and being forgotten can prevent them from being so. This deprives their creators from part of their lives that, in spite of appearing trivial at first, might acquire a deeper meaning with the passage of time. The work done throughout this thesis addresses this issue by proposing the creation of personal digital repositories to collect information regarding personal content. Instead of focusing on collecting the content itself, the personal digital repository prioritises gathering metadata about the content (when not immediately at risk) in order to lead its owner back to the “cloud” applications where the content can still be found in its original context. In personal scenarios it is not feasible to rely on trained personnel to help with content gathering and organisation. To mitigate this issue, content is collected as soon as possible by collection agents. These are designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, also offering additional services that can be used even without the personal digital repository in order to encourage their adoption. This creates an intertwined ecosystem where the content collection agents feed the personal digital repository and can in turn use previously collected content to support their additional services. This work also describes a proposed extension to the CIDOC/CRM model, used to classify and organise the collected information. The extension was created due to a perceived gap in the CIDOC/CRM model when it came to dealing with digital objects

Электронные библиотеки: перспективные методы и технологии, электронные коллекции

Электронные библиотеки – область исследований и разработок, направленных на развитие теории и практики обработки, распространения, хранения, анализа и поиска цифровых данных различной природы. Основная цель серии конференций RCDL заключается в формировании сообщества специалистов России, ведущих исследования и разработки в области электронных библиотек и близких областях. Всероссийская научная конференция 2009 г. (RCDL'2009) является одиннадцатой конференцией по данной тематике (1999 г. – Санкт-Петербург, 2000 г. – Протвино, 2001 г. – Петрозаводск, 2002 г. – Дубна, 2003 г. – Санкт-Петербург, 2004 г. – Пущино, 2005 г. – Ярославль, 2006 г. – Суздаль, 2007 г. – Переславль-Залесский, 2008 г. – Дубна). Настоящий сборник включает тексты докладов, коротких сообщений и стендовых докладов, отобранных Программным комитетом RCDL'2009 в результате проведенного рецензирования